[Politech] The European Constitution has no First Amendment [fs]

From: Declan McCullagh (declan@private)
Date: Mon Apr 25 2005 - 19:52:34 PDT


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: For FC--EU Constitution has no first amendment
Date: Mon, 25 Apr 2005 05:45:14 -0400
From: James Lucier <james.lucier@private>
To: Declan McCullagh <declan@private>


http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2005/0425/097.html




Companies, People, Ideas
Liberty, European-Style
Dan Seligman,   04.25.05


The EU has funny ideas about human rights. For example, the idea that free
speech is not among those rights.
Viewed from 3,000 miles away, the European Union looks like a kind of
parallel United States. On both sides of the Atlantic, living standards are
high, government is democratic and educated people speak English.

View it up close and you see striking differences. One of them is that
America has the First Amendment and Europe doesn't. You can argue endlessly
about whether the Founding Fathers intended the free speech
clause--"Congress shall make no law Š abridging the freedom of speech"--to
protect flag-burning and nude dancing. But news stories from assorted Old
World democracies make a persuasive case that they badly need a First
Amendment over there. Not impeded by one, governments engage in a degree of
speech suppression unimaginable in the U.S.

A lot of the suppression takes place via national "speech codes" somewhat
similar to those imposed on numerous American campuses in the 1990s but
repeatedly struck down by First Amendment rulings. Here, for example, is a
news story (broadcast by the BBC) reporting that Croatia, currently a
candidate for EU membership, is broadening its laws against "hate speech" so
that it would be criminal to engage in "spreading racism and xenophobia."
Here is another story reporting that a respected political scientist in
Finland--he happens to be the father of the country's prime minister--was
being investigated by the "central criminal investigation department" for an
interview he gave to a newspaper, in which he expressed the view that
Africa's economic problems reflected low intelligence, not the heritage of
colonialism. (He was eventually cleared.)

[...]
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